>>Re: Healthcare. When the employer mandate kicks in, an estimated 20 million people are likely to lose their insurance and get thrown onto the exchanges. Some will get better plans. Some will get worse plans. And some will probably get something similar to what they had.

That Chicken Little prediction is superseded. In 2011, McKinsey found that 30% of employers would drop coverage after 2014. However, by earlier this year a Kaiser Family survey found that fewer than 10% percent of employers plan to drop coverage. And the very latest 12 December 2014 published stats are saying that only 1% of employers plan to drop coverage in 2015.

Unemployment is falling and the employment landscape is changing and employers remember why they volunteered to provide healthcare plans in the first place: to compete for workers. Employers may not like the mandate, but unsurprisingly a majority of workers do according to recent surveys. Employers are not going to cut off their noses to spite their faces and see the best employees vote with their feet. The downside to all this is that penalty revenue was costed into some of the budget plans to the tune of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars so if employers aren't going to co-operate with Chicken Little and pay penalties, Republicans are going to inherit some big budget holes.